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1. How the age of your and other people's websites affects your rankings

High
rankings on all major search engines
are influenced by the number of
web pages that link to a web page
and by the quality of the web
pages that link to a page.

Links from popular and trusted web pages have a bigger impact on the search engine rankings of a web page than links from less popular and trusted pages.

A new patent application with the name "Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity" indicates that there is another factor that helps search engines to determine the quality of a web page.

How the new method can be used to detect high quality links

Here's the abstract of the new patent application:

"Ranking domains for search engines is provided herein. To rank a domain, contributing domains associated with the domain are identified. Additionally, the maturity of each of the contributing domains is determined.

A rank for the domain is then determined based at least in part on the maturity of each of the contributing domains. The domain rankings may then be used to order results for search queries."

The patent applications indicates that newer domains are more likely to be spam or part of a link system that tries to game search engine algorithms.

Web pages that have links from older domains may be ranked higher than other domains in the search results.

Why do search engines think that new domains are likely to be spam?

Domain names are cheap and some domain name registrars even offer free domain registration and trial periods.

Spammers can easily take advantage of these offers to build a network of websites that link to each other (a so-called link farm).

The new patent describes how search engines can use the age of websites to specify the value of their links. For example, links from websites that are several years old could have a high effect on the search engine positions of the ranked sites while links from newly created websites might not have any effect at all.

The age of the websites that link to a web page is not the only factor that influences the position of your website in the search result pages.

Actually, that are several dozen factors that decide whether your website will get top positions on Google or not. Having them all in place makes the difference between a successful website and a website that no one visits.

"Google market share declined 0.6ppts despite 5% volume growth… the first decline in nine months. Yahoo! continued the slide with market share dropping another point to a new record low and was the only engine with year-over-year share losses"

"Over the next few days, we'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

"China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users. [...] The percentage of American users — 71% — still exceeds China's 17%. China has 1.3 billion people, compared with nearly 304 million in the USA."